For Harry Berger, and at the prompting of Julian Lethbridge:

The editors of The Manchester Spenser have worried about the concept of a 
"sonnet sequence" as poems in a certain brief form that have been grouped or 
collected into one volume, and regularly and early on printed as a group 
with "theme and variations" as their plot ... well, I'm not sure I really do 
object to the old term, but "sonnet collection" got suggested as a 
substitute.  Some sequences are more collected than others, or some 
collections more sequenced than others.  On this teleological consideration 
hangs a tale--perhaps theirs.

The Scattered Rimes of the title of Petrarch’s collection seems to want to 
contradict the idea of sequence, even while numeration enforces it: for the 
deliberation (or deliberateness) as to where the poems go in the sequence 
and or the "story"or "history" is apparent and, as it were, in several cases 
numerologically preordained. (Compare the reflection on scattered 
pages/leaves at end of Dante's Paradiso.)

But is there a theory of criteria for what constitutes or what are the 
protocols for "sonnet sequences" (something like my own son's discussion, 
with respect to Lowell's Life Studies and Yeats' The Tower, of the internal 
quasi-narratalogical co-ordinated-ness or coherence of this sub-genre of 
poetical collections?

Presumably a core criterion would be a Petrarch-Laura relation. Yet 
Shakespeare has no fetishized name for the Laura/s (nor for the "ego" or 
"Will"), and so the criterion begins to fail. As for what a sequence 
actually is, I should say it is a group of sonnets that evinces something of 
a common object or preoccupation, as it were a "cynosure" or "magnet for 
attention," and that transcends the mere exigencies of a miscellaneous 
collection of separate pieces, by virtue of the sonnets' interconnection, 
narrative thread -- most often the life of a subject’s amorous passion or 
desire for another person (one other than the implied speaker, the first 
person, though a narcissus motif may occasionally call this bi-centeredness 
into question) -- inscription of an "ego" in a forelengthened relation to 
another and admired party, and/or the sense of a suit (suasion through 
praise and pleas) and its development (as in a plot, or in lieu one) or 
attendant intrigue. But that's the merest a stab at the problem of a working 
definition.

On the definition of a sequence, if we leave out the sonnet part, but keep 
the collection of short lyrics with an (oftentimes named) erotic cynosure in 
its place, I suppose among our precedents (for the history of a passion) 
might be Sextus Propertius.

The case can certainly be made that the more strictly defined sequences 
gather into them the more "scattered rimes" of earlier sonnets not 
themselves "sequenced" or (to coin a definition) "plotted as belonging to a 
group by a single author of them."  "The Progress of the Soule" is an 
implicit subject, as much as "the progress of an affair" is an explicit one.

Even where sonnets do not seem to fall into anything quite like a genuine 
sequence (or even evince such a "plot" upon a singular self-groupedness), 
but rather fall into various clusters (as in Milton’s poems on political 
subjects, or honoring great associates, or observing himself), the 
"production of a virtual train of sonnets" -- under the strain of a given 
preoccupation, and on the part of a given, individual poet -- might well be 
made to "count" for a collection.  "The Antiquities of Rome" becomes a 
"sonnet sequence" with Dea Roma as the cynosure, but the lady as an elegiac 
rather than an erotic one.  The death of Laura, of course, allows Petrarch 
both possibilities.

So the problem here, apparently, is the defining or re-defining of -- or the 
constricting or enlarging of -- the scope of a single author’s "publishing" 
project, where there need not be much difference between editing a 
collection, and creating one, and not much difference between a mistress and 
a fixed subject (or object) of intensified preoccupation or focus.

Now how would any of this apply to the comparison between Spenser and 
Shakespeare?

Well, if the object of contemplation or cathexis is a single one, it can 
readily be associated with and serve as a stand-in for the One:  the True, 
the Fair, and the Good.  Here we note the logical development of the concept 
of "Divine Sonnets," where the Ideal merges with the Deity. and the 
Petrarch-Laura relation becomes an I-Thou relation.  On the other hand, if 
the object of contemplation tends to be plural or fickle or indeterminate or 
elusive or evasive, it more readily becomes a stand-in for the Flux: the 
unreliable, the unruly, and the insubstantial – "Regretful Sonnets," so to 
speak.  Somewhere in between comes the perplexing of the simple plot of 
subjectified cathexis by the complications and temporality of an intrigue 
involving rivalry, divided or wavering loyalties, courtship against itself, 
opportunity or opportunity lost, "opportunity cost," self-preservation, 
keeping up with the Joneses or Waltons, mortalilty, etc.

No sonnet sequence, in our sense, will be free of either pole, but neither 
different individual poems nor different authors’ sequences taken as wholes 
will strike the same balance between them (the aforesaid poles).  Where, we 
are to ask ourselves, does the author or the poem or the sequence stand in 
the progression given by the triumph of love over indifference, the triumph 
of chastity over eros, the triumph of mortality over virtue, the triumph of 
fame over mortality, the triumph of mutabililty and forgetfulness and 
oblivion over fame, and the triumph of eternity over the depradations of 
time?  "But thought’s the slave of life, / And life’s time’s fool, / And 
time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop" -- and this 
e-mail, despite its having failed to quote from a single sonnet, is no 
exception.



On Wed, 6 Jun 2007 06:36:53 -0700
  "Harry Berger, Jr." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I now have a substantial Nohrnberg file and am starting a sonnet file. The 
>List is really cooking these days. You could write a book responding to 
>this pride of lucubrations. Jim just about has. The only problem I'm having 
>is Filter-Schmerz.  For some reason almost half the Spenserlist entries 
>arrive in my Junk box while the In box waves through about 40% of the 
>viagra and supercialis reveries, most of which seem to have originated in 
>Schroeder's Orgoglio.
> 
> Anyway, thanks, Jim and friends.

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121